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Homeschool Helper is a brand new homeschool planning app for iPad, just released in July, 2012. And I am in love.
For someone like me who loves technology (especially my iPad), but is a planning failure, this app, designed by a homeschool family, is nearly perfect. With a quick swipe of the finger, you can do so many things to keep your homeschool organized and even plan for your student’s days. And because this is a company that listens to their customers, they’ve just completed their first major update.
Setting up the app for each of your students is easy peasy. But should you need help, there are tutorial videos and an example student to help guide you. If you still have questions, you can email the company from a link on the app.
Here’s a quick pictorial (screen shot) review to give you an idea of what it looks like once you have it all set up.We’ll start with the homepage, where all of your students’ names will be listed. The settings “coffee cup” gives you a few options to change the colors, include the “sample” student or not, and allow deleting of students and subjects, or not. You’ll tap the eraser if you need to edit your student info, add a subject, or change the grading scale.The post-it note houses all of the instructional videos, should you need them. It’s a pretty intuitive app, so you may or may not. You’ll click on the pencil to add a student. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to go.Just click on a student name to begin.
All of the subject tabs along the top auto-fill as you enter the information for your student. The tabs along the sides are built in to the program.
Planning for each subject is a breeze. Here, you can see how I plugged in Ben’s math lessons with Life of Fred, 2 days a week. I’m only planning 4 weeks at a time (8 lesson repeats), every Monday and Wednesday, beginning Sep 4. Once I finished this input, I also added math lessons for Math Essentials on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Once the lessons are entered, when you click on the “Math” tab at the top, this is what you see. If you click on the little box that reads “Enter Grades,” you can do just that — record daily grades, as well as quizzes and tests. You can also edit this page to note when the lessons have been completed. You’ll notice the numbers in parentheses with Life of Fred. Those are there because I checked the “prefix with sequence” box above. The numbers happen to correlate with which lessons I expect Ben to do those days.
I won’t bore you buy showing each subject’s lesson plans, since they all work the same way. Let’s take a peek now at the tabs along the right side.
First up is the Attendance Chart. It’s very simple to use. You just tap on the date once for a full day of school and twice for a half day. The default is “absent.”
Next up is the Reading List. You can easily enter which books your student is reading or the ones you wish to assign, and when they complete each book, edit the app to note that.
For a family like ours who thrives on field trips, I love that they included a tab for Field Trips. I’ve already entered some that are upcoming. Once we have completed the field trip, I can go in and edit that part. I’m hoping that I won’t forget any field trips this year!
The Reports tab is great for when you want to print a record. With a quick tap, you can email any or all of the reports to yourself. They arrive in your inbox in a printable format. If I have one piece of constructive criticism, it’s that I find the font difficult to read on this page. It’s fine on the tabs, but in paragraphs, it makes my eyes go a little wonky. Since I don’t really have to read it often, it’s not really a huge issue.
The Summary tab shows just what it says, a summary. You’ll find grades and grade point averages for each subject, a record of attendance, your task list and upcoming field trips here. We haven’t started course work, but I went ahead and entered grades to show you what this looks like.
A nice monthly calendar shows which days you have courses scheduled with a little red flag. The number indicates how many different assignments there are each day. If you click on one of those red flags, it will bring up your student’s lessons for that day. You’ll notice that Fridays are blank on our calendar. That’s because we don’t schedule anything for Fridays. We leave those days open for “Friday Fun School” and Field Trip Friday.” I wish that the field trips we have scheduled showed up there. That would make this app just about perfect.
There’s more, but this will give you a good visual of what you can do with Homeschool Helper. It is simply an amazing tool and worth every penny of the $4.99 price. Seriously, skip Starbucks this month and buy this app. You won’t miss the coffee and you will be so glad to have this convenient and reliable method of planning and recording your homeschool days.
Interested in purchasing this app? Here’s a link to download it from iTunes or Amazon.com.
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